Back in the late 90s through the end of 2001, I did my time in Silicon
Valley doing PR – hell, I’m even writing a novel about PR in the Valley
(someday I may even finish it) – now I read this from the New York Times,
and I’m wondering if this is anything new, or just Déjà Vu? It all sounds
remarkably familiar – the mediums change, but the “it’s who you
know/socialite chic” kind of crap seems to stay the same. This breathless
style of glam reporting seems better suited to covering the Obamas’ vacation
in the Hamptons than to covering PR in the Valley, but perhaps I’m missing
something.



Back in the day, the smart word on the street was all about the “Golden
Rolodex” – and I didn’t buy it then, and I don’t buy it now. To me, it was,
is and always shall be about the news value of the story and the
effectiveness of communicating that news value in a brief, targeted pitch.
But maybe I’m old-fashioned.



I’ve got nothing against the new media – hell, I gave a talk on ethics and
social media last month to IABC – but I also disagree that social media has
different fundamental rules than do other kinds of media used by PR folks.
Am I wrong here?



As a famous cable news guy asks, “What say you?”





July 5, 2009


Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/claire_cain_mi
ller/index.html?inline=nyt-per> CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Menlo Park, Calif. — Brooke Hammerling (publicist) and Erin McKean
(entrepreneur) are in a Sand Hill Road conference room, hashing out plans to
unveil Ms. McKean’s <http://www.wordnik.com/> new Web site, Wordnik.

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth,
suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek
sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also
in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere
mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his
concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers
of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know
the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing
with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the
tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s
Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay
Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?in
line=nyt-org> Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

Notably, none are journalists.

This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the
lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of
followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than
old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.

Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant
mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web
sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web
to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that
analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of
P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.

While public relations is just one arrow in the marketing quiver for most
companies, it plays an especially crucial role in a region where dozens of
start-ups are born each month. Without money for advertising, these unknown
companies have to promote themselves to potential users, investors,
employees and partners.

“Few tech companies with absolutely no P.R. have built a user base
successfully,” said Margit Wennmachers, a co-founder of OutCast
Communications, a P.R. agency in San Francisco that opened in 1997. “They
need P.R. to put the booster under that rocket ship.”

In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers,
bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed
dial. Ms. Hammerling, the latest example of the omnipresent start-up
pitchwoman, is the doyenne of who-you-know P.R.

She arrived in Silicon Valley from the East Coast in 1997, just when the
dot-com craze was reaching a crescendo and P.R.’s pivotal role in the
start-up world was being cemented. And the evolution of her own tactics has
run parallel to the ever-changing marketing forays that make this area a
singular hotbed of promotional experimentation.

Dena Cook, Ms. Hammerling’s business partner at Brew Media Relations,
recalls the boom years when start-ups sent P.R. firms handsome checks that
the firms had to return because they didn’t have room for new clients. For
start-ups that did corral a P.R. adviser, it often didn’t matter if they had
a solid business; Ms. Cook says a regional newspaper once ran a glowing
article about one of her clients the same day the company went out of
business.

At the time, tools of the trade were largely limited to press releases and
pitch letters, embargoes and exclusives and, of course, the legendary and
often criticized parties. Those events included martinis and Champagne,
lobster and shrimp, Tori Amos and Aerosmith, all to celebrate companies that
had yet to make a cent.

In those days, it took about six months to bring to market a new product or
a start-up, Ms. Wennmachers recalls. First came East Coast tours with
analysts and monthly publications, followed by visits to weeklies, then
dailies.

But the rise of blogs and social networks — and companies’ ability to post
information on their own sites — transformed all this. Gradually, deadlines
disappeared, as even monthly magazines offered Web sites that published
stories by the minute.

“Now the best ideas bubble up, which is great for start-ups,” Ms.
Wennmachers says. “It’s no longer, ‘if you can’t get so-and-so to do a
story, you can’t make it.’ ”

For new companies’ trying to get the word out, there’s a healthy measure of
liberation in all of this. For publicists, the era of e-mail, blogs and
Twitter has the potential to turn the entire idea of P.R. professionals as
gatekeepers on its head.

Donna Sokolsky Burke, co-founder of Spark PR, another influential firm in
San Francisco, acknowledges that the advent of social networks has upended
all the traditional marketing and promotional practices that once helped
make Silicon Valley, well, Silicon Valley. But she says that publicists will
continue to play indispensable roles.

“You absolutely have to be aware of power users who put things up on
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.ht
ml?inline=nyt-org> Facebook, Flickr,
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/yelp/index.html?inlin
e=nyt-org> Yelp,” Ms. Burke says. “P.R. is important because it’s pretty
intensive to figure out who they are.”

Exactly, Ms. Hammerling says.

“I think it’s key to have a personal face, to not be filtered. Does that
mean we lose our value? Absolutely not,” she says. “As the world has
exploded into so many ways of communication, we’re helping them navigate
it.”

MS. BURKE says that when her firm began representing Flickr, the photo
sharing site, in 2004, she never issued a press release for it, even when it
was acquired by
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/yahoo_inc/index.html?
inline=nyt-org> Yahoo. Flickr would publish news on its company blog, a few
more blogs would pick it up “and two days later, BusinessWeek would call,”
she recalls.

Some business people say that because journalists would rather hear stories
directly from the entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about their
companies — rather than from publicists’ faking excitement — the role of
publicists becomes less crucial. Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a
real estate Web site, says he has never hired a P.R. person. “Besides,” he
says, “with the real-time Web, there’s no time to vet every message through
three layers of spin.”

Indeed, irritation has been rising among tech reporters forced to field as
many as 50 canned pitches a day from publicists representing start-ups
desperate to break through.

Recent missives from the influential tech bloggers Michael Arrington and
Robert Scoble have attacked the P.R. industry as being out of touch. Rafe
Needleman, an editor at CNET, has started a <http://proprtips.com/> blog
called Pro PR Tips that gives publicists elementary guidance, such as
“Before you press ‘send’ on your bulk e-mail press release, make sure the
site you’re pitching is actually live.”

In response to dissatisfied clients and huge shifts in the media landscape,
a new breed of publicist is emerging, says Brian D. Solis, a P.R. guy who
writes a <http://www.briansolis.com/> blog called PR 2.0. His firm,
FutureWorks, has a broad definition of “writer,” a category that includes
those in mainstream media as well as the tens of thousands of bloggers and
Twitter users who have developed avid followings by writing about niche
topics.

“Mommy bloggers are the new TechCrunch; they’re such an influential crowd,”
Mr. Solis says.

Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a
publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, Mr. Solis counts the number
of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the
number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and
other social networks.

Despite all these new channels, Ms. Burke says it’s still essential to know
which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture
funding or new engineers, she says, Sparks PR still looks to The San Jose
Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.

AS with so many professions in the digital era, public relations boils down
to a juggling act, an effort to weigh and exploit the varied strengths of
old media and new.

Ms. Hammerling, at 35 years old one of the ubiquitous presences on the
Silicon Valley publicity scene, has navigated these waters for years. In
1999, she got a job at MobShop, a group shopping Web site, where she got a
taste of P.R. in boom-time Silicon Valley. She no longer had trouble getting
reporters to call her back; instead she had trouble getting them to stop
calling.

“I didn’t have to pitch; I just had to pick up the phone and say no,” she
recalls. “Everybody wanted you. How do you say no to that when your
competition is absolutely saying, ‘Yes, we’ll be in Fortune and on the cover
of Fast Company’?”

Then, in 2001, after getting “more press than I’ve ever seen,” she says,
MobShop died. “It shows that P.R. can’t be the end-all and be-all,” she
says. “Everyone knew who they were, but at the end of the day, they couldn’t
make any money.”

Many other small P.R. shops that had sprouted up went out of business or
were acquired. Ms. Hammerling moved back to New York, where she eventually
joined the Zeno Group, an offshoot of Edelman. There, she focused on getting
to know journalists and making sure that she was at every tech conference
and party.

One day in 2005, she went into her managers’ office to tell them she wanted
to focus more on her relationships with the media and less on writing press
releases and handling administrative tasks.

“There are no stars in P.R.,” she says one boss told her — the job should be
about behind-the-scenes teamwork, not individual personalities. “That
literally hit me like a ton of bricks,” she says. She quit. (Citing firm
policy, Zeno declined to comment on Ms. Hammerling’s tenure.)

Ms. Hammerling then hired a financial manager, persuaded some of Zeno’s
clients to come with her and started a new firm in New York that she named
Brew (her childhood nickname).

From the get-go, she focused on one-on-one communication and relationships
with hundreds of writers and pundits. Over the years, her contact list
swelled to the point that her stories now overflow with dropped names. There
are the e-mail messages from Larry Ellison, the chief executive of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/oracle_corporation/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-org> Oracle, and the time she handled a client’s crisis
from her BlackBerry while traveling to St. Barts to join the former
Hollywood überagent
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/michael_ovitz/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> Michael Ovitz and his family on his yacht. Or the
time she was in her bikini at a Mexican resort, checking her e-mail at the
hotel’s computer, when Ron Conway, a veteran tech investor, walked in.

Or the purportedly secret poker party she threw in her suite at a recent
tech conference: “All my friends were there — Arianna was there, the Twitter
boys were there,” referring to
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/arianna_huffin
gton/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Arianna Huffington of The
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/the_huf
fington_post/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Huffington Post and Evan Williams
and Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founders.

“Arianna told me I was a great hostess, and I thought I was going to die,”
she said, putting on a Greek accent to imitate Ms. Huffington: “I’m Greek, I
know what it’s like to be a hostess.” (She would repeat this story several
times in the weeks a reporter spent following her around.)

Though Ms. Hammerling may be known in the Valley more for whom she knows
than for the clients she represents, she shares something else with Ms.
Huffington: an astute understanding of how valuable strategic name-dropping
can be. It is the currency she uses to make sure people know she is someone
worth knowing, and it has paid off.

“I will listen to her pitch on some little fledgling start-up I have no
interest in, in part because of the coterie of connections she brings with
her,” says Dennis Kneale, the media and technology editor at CNBC.

Ms. Hammerling’s connections have been crucial for Brew in finding and
serving clients, says Ms. Cook, her business partner: “Without question,
that allows us to play at a different level, because we’re not just doing
P.R. and media relations; we’re connecting people at the highest level,
helping deals get done.”

Ms. Hammerling landed Brew’s most successful client,
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/netsuite-inc/index.ht
ml?inline=nyt-org> NetSuite, through her relationship with Mr. Ellison, who
was a co-founder of the business software company. While dating an R.E.M.
band member she met
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/bono/index.htm
l?inline=nyt-per> Bono, lead singer of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/u2/inde
x.html?inline=nyt-org> U2, and then Roger McNamee, Bono’s investment
partner. When Mr. McNamee personally invested in Wordnik, he called Ms.
Hammerling.

All of which gives rise to a series of Brooke-isms: how many executives and
reporters are “dear friends,” how she “worships at the altar” of a NetSuite
board member and likes a team of venture capitalists so much that “I just
want to put them in my pocket.” Yet by most accounts, the relationships she
builds are real and deep.

“She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time,
it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone
and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a
journalist who did not want to be identified to avoid the professional risk
of offending Ms. Hammerling.

Her job is all-consuming. This last spring, she held bicoastal 35th birthday
parties for herself in New York and San Francisco. The guest lists were
filled with clients and reporters.

“They’re my real friends,” she says. “My job has become my life and my life
imitates my work, but I love that.”

Her effervescent personality and proximity to the people she works with have
sometimes set tongues wagging in Silicon Valley. “That prejudice is
something we all suffer through,” she says. “When smart women interact with
smart men, there is always a dynamic there.”

She ponders the issue further.

“I had to struggle when I was younger to be taken seriously and not just be
considered to be a cute girl,” she adds. “If I gain 100 pounds and my skin
broke out and I had glasses and frizzy hair, would I be as effective at my
job? Yes, because of the relationships I built.”

If there’s a madness in her lifestyle, there’s still a method behind what
she does. And time spent perched on her shoulder offers some insights into
how the publicity game is shifting.

MS. HAMMERLING’S presentation on Erin McKean’s start-up, Wordnik, is a case
study in how relationships still matter in the Valley (as they do
elsewhere). But it also shows how the Web’s amplification of many voices,
and not just those of professional writers, has transformed P.R.

Ms. McKean — the former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary and
author of a blog about dresses and sewing — is an unlikely tech
entrepreneur, and Ms. Hammerling is her guide through Silicon Valley. As
they discuss whom to pitch Wordnik to, each name that came up elicits a
knowing squeal from Ms. Hammerling.

A tech blogger? “A dear friend,” she says.

The writers of DailyCandy? “They are all my friends.”

Barbara Wallraff, who writes Word Court, a syndicated column about language?
“I love her, love her,” Ms. Hammerling says, her voice rising.

Biz Stone, of Twitter? “I was just talking to Biz on the plane and he’s
excited about Wordnik; I’ll ping him.”

Executives from
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/amazon_inc/index.html
?inline=nyt-org> Amazon.com, a potential partner for Wordnik? “We could get
in front of the top guys there,” Ms. Hammerling responds with a coy smile.

“It didn’t matter what name we came up with, Brooke knew them, or knew
somebody who knew them,” Ms. McKean says later. “If she is not the mayor of
the town, then at least she runs the post office and knows where everybody
gets their mail.”

In the end, Ms. McKean and Wordnik’s advisers and investors decide to talk
to a handful of bloggers who focus on language and to only one tech blogger,
Caroline McCarthy at CNET, because, as Ms. Hammerling notes, “she could have
fun with it, as opposed to writing a business story.”

Ms. Hammerling plans to approach one journalist, Quentin Hardy at Forbes,
not because she wants him to write about Wordnik in the magazine but because
she hopes he’ll mention it on his personal Twitter and Facebook feeds.

“I don’t know if this is a Forbes story at this point,” she says. “I see it
more of Quentin as an influencer, Quentin the person.” Wordnik hasn’t
announced how it will make money, and its backers are worried that some
reporters and writers will pick apart that fact. So the group decides that
Wordnik will be presented as a “project” instead of as a “company.”

A few weeks later, Ms. Hammerling sets up a phone call with Ms. McKean and
Mr. Adelson, the Digg C.E.O. He advises her on building mobile sites, offers
to share Digg’s research on user-generated content and asks her to call back
when she’s ready for partnerships.

When Wordnik went live last month, Mr. Adelson tweeted about it. Digg’s
founder, Kevin Rose, later tweeted to his then 759,310 followers that
Wordnik was “truly amazing.” Most of the other tweets and blog posts
described Wordnik as “an ongoing project,” adopting the language the P.R.
team had decided on.

BY 6:30 p.m. on the day Wordnik went live, Brew’s staff had calculated that
1.43 million people had seen tweets about it. CNET and a handful of blogs
also wrote about the site. None of the coverage was in print, and most
wasn’t by professional journalists.

The publicity sent 40,000 people to Wordnik’s Web site to perform 170,000
searches the following week and caught the attention of reporters at USA
Today and The Wall Street Journal who hoped to write articles. A couple of
media companies have contacted Wordnik to talk about potential partnerships
and mentioned that they read the tweets of Mr. Adelson or Mr. Rose.

Ms. Hammerling says the approach she took with Wordnik accounts for about a
third of Brew’s pitches and is becoming more common. Today, she says, people
want to broadcast on Twitter. Tomorrow, the medium could change. But the
core of her job won’t, she says:

“It will morph, but it’s still about relationships.”





Ned Barnett, APR

Marketing/PR Fellow, American Hospital Association



Barnett Marketing Communications

420 N. Nellis Blvd. A3-276

Las Vegas NV 89110



702-696-1200 - ned@...

http://www.barnettmarcom.com





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